


shatter

by BlackSclera



Category: Magic Kaito, 名探偵コナン | Detective Conan | Case Closed
Genre: Disturbing thoughts and behaviors, Dubious Consent, Identity Issues, Kaito-centric, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Stalking, Unreliable Narrator, im sorry i cant? write any good things its a daily struggle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:53:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27644404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackSclera/pseuds/BlackSclera
Summary: Unlike him, the detective doesn’t carry the weight of having too much of others inside him and too little of himself. Unlike him, the voices in Kaito’s head are alive, pushing and pushing and pushing themselves to the front of his mind, begging to take reign, while the only voice that plagues Kudo Shinichi’s head is the screaming.
Relationships: Kudou Shinichi | Edogawa Conan/Kuroba Kaito | Kaitou Kid
Comments: 13
Kudos: 55





	shatter

The line blurs. It’s so very easy for it to happen when they are fundamentally the same people in everything but soul; where the distinction between their physical features are near non-existent, where their circumstances are built on flimsy, towering white lies, subjecting all those dear to them to things they knew were wrong but necessary, where they have forcefully carved a hole into the husk they call their body to fill it with another soul carrying the burden of their mistakes- hubris, where the Detective is concerned, and a self-imposed obligation in the form of a white suit and the death of a father for Kaito.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Kaito whispered once, trailing gloved fingers over the detective’s eyelids and lips with a whisper-soft touch. It’s not often that he gets to touch him like this. “I feel more like myself whenever I pretend to be you.”

And it’s not the same for him, Kaito knows that for himself because he’s a little insane, a little unhinged from being a little too good at pretending to be somebody else. He is Kuroba Kaito, except he isn’t always him, sometimes he’s Kid, and sometimes he’s the librarian who is allergic to peanuts with a quirky habit of painting her nails mismatching colors in the bookstore across the bar, sometimes he’s the old man who wanders the park with the bracelet of his deceased wife loosely dangling from his weak wrist, sometimes he’s one or five of his classmates, their voices tickling his throat and mannerisms stuttering over theirs and imitating them from the slope of their backs to the tilt of their shoulders.

Unlike him, the detective doesn’t carry the weight of having too much of others inside him and too little of himself. Unlike him, the voices in Kaito’s head are alive, pushing and pushing and _pushing_ themselves to the front of his mind, begging to take reign, while the only voice that plagues Kudo Shinichi’s head is the screaming.

The line blurs, and it’s only Kaito who can tell. 

-

“When will it end?”

Kid grins, grins, grins. The one in front of him is Shinichi, weary with the weight of too many years cramped in the tiny, fragile body of a child. Vulnerable. His back faces him, hands occupied with pocketing his glasses as he lets his head fall, the nape of his neck bared. Far too much of himself is out in the open. 

_I trust you,_ he manages to say without saying as such.

For once, the voices are quiet. Kid tries not to burst out into delighted peals of laughter at the fact. He is sure his detective wouldn’t appreciate it.

“Who knows?” It’s not an answer and it isn’t meant to be. At this point, when it ends doesn’t matter, but if they can manage to hold on until then. They’re fraying at the edges, wasting away, falling deeper into the graves they dug with their own hands. The detective is simultaneously years behind and ahead of the people around him, and Kaito is just trying to get through the moment without being strangled to death, either by the mantle of Kaito Kid or the voices in his head. 

It’s a stupid question to ask. Shinichi smiles wryly like he’s thinking the same since they don’t have any other options. It's not like they can abandon what they’ve started this far along.

He sighs.

“I know it’s selfish and impossible but for one day… For just one day, I wish I wasn’t myself.”

“As Conan?” Kid asks.

The detective angles his head to look up at him, the moon bright over his head and his eyes distractingly blue. There is something knowing in his gaze. Kid and Kaito and the chasm in between those two names think he looks untouchable like this. Thinks of wanting that for themselves, his delicate throat held tight between his naked fingers, thinks of hurting him so he’s stripped bare, thinks of breathing his air from his lips and making him cry, making him scream, making him _a part of him_ -

“Don’t you feel the same way?”

-

The line continues to blur.

A dove. Two, three, five with cameras that scouted the Mori’s. He learns how to make his coffee the way he likes it, buys the same perfume as his mother to lightly dapple on his skin to elicit familiarity during their encounters, studies everything he likes and hates until he could list thousands of them with his eyes closed. He doesn’t quite steal, no, but he does fake an injury to have Shinichi give him part of his clothes to stop the bleeding. That very same night, Kaito and Kid and something not quite Kaito clutches that bloodstained fabric and smells it as he touches himself, breath stuttering over the name of the detective as his lips twist into an alien grin. 

It’s obsessive, twisted, _rotten_. He now knows how Shinichi writes his letters, tricks him into speaking in languages he knew so he could imitate them word for word with the right tweak of accent, studies the angles and lines at which he bends and moves and walks. 

Shinichi wouldn’t know it, doesn’t know it, but he has met Kaito and Kid and Kaito Kid every day. He is the soft-spoken salaryman he bumps into the train, the coy woman who wore an oddly flattering blue lipstick that spilled coffee on herself, the performer by the street with an old guitar by the crime scene, the convenience store employee who hands him mint and honey-lemon candies at 3 am, and many more times, he’d become part of the task force that is mobilized whenever “the sleeping Kogoro” stumbles into a murder. “Become”, Kid contemplates, Kaito echoes, because it’s never a disguise. Not anymore. He _becomes_ _them_ and the only boundary between that wholeness is his blood. 

The line has blurred. 

Kaito starts to wonder if it has always been there.

-

Kaito thinks it's love. Kid says it’s a predictable outcome. The others laugh and scream and plead to let the poor boy go.

Nightly rendezvous filled with spilled, bleeding secrets that they wouldn’t dare utter in the presence of others and under the secrecy of the moonlight, the feeling of silk and warm skin soft to the touch. The voices tell him this isn’t right, because the one Shinichi surrenders himself to was carved from the flesh of Kuroba Kaito and he doesn’t exist. _He isn’t real._ All there is was the hours and months not-Kid dedicated to following him with unnaturally bright eyes, shadowing him as he parades around with the other children, watching his behind with an unnatural interest that quiets even the loudest of them in his head. This goes beyond a physical interest, beyond intellectual curiosity, because Kaito-Kid looks at Edogawa Conan like he will devour him whole and Kudo Shinichi mistakes it for love.

“Got something on your mind?” the detective asks him with a quirked brow, mouth tilting to an attractive smirk.

Kaito laughs against his lips, the sound perfect and almost genuine. He doesn’t know if he had always laughed like that or if he borrowed-stole-taken that from someone else. He must have, one of the voices urge, because he never had anything for himself.

“Only you.” And it isn’t a lie.

Kid takes everything that he is willing to give and more, and if it’s possible, the name “Kudo Shinichi” grows inside his chest until it threatens to rip him apart, piece by irredeemable piece.

Shinichi’s eyes are fond as he gently touches Kato’s face like he is a fragile gem. “I love you,” he whispers.

Not-Kaito presses his face into his neck. He tells him not to say something like that with such a look, with _that_ voice, as he shivers and engraves the hitch in his breath and the tightness of his arms around him with the intent of replicating it when he’s in the privacy of his room with nothing but the moonlight as his company.

“Me too,” he replies. 

-

It’s Ran who sets fire to the garden Kaito and Kid and Kaito painstakingly took care of. For a disconcerting second, he sees why Shinichi would love her and her tenacity, the blazing fire in her eyes that’s tempered to a gentle warmth when she holds those she loves. Kaito doesn’t hate her but he wishes he could.

“Yesterday.” She is not looking at him. Weakness- trepidation, uncertainty, whatever she will say, she doesn’t believe enough to get angry at. Not yet. “After we went our separate ways from the café, I called you.”

Kaito doesn’t bat an eyelash. “And I answered,” he says, making sure to inject confusion into his tone.

“I called you twice.” Kid pauses at that. Not-Aoko breaks something inside his head. Not-Hakuba turns away, the grating tick-tocks of a clock rattling inside his ribs. 

Because he doesn’t remember there being a second call, and the way she’s talking, he knows it could only mean one thing. Shinichi had answered it.

 _She knows. She knows, she knows, she_ ** _knows_ ** _-_

“You aren’t Shinichi, are you?” Ran asks, soft, deeply afraid. She eyes his hair and his clothes as if doing just that will give her the answer. “I thought it was weird that he would easily agree to me inviting him out this week but you…”

It’s Kid who laughs while Kaito breaks into another fragment, and he hits the ground with a distant cling before being ground into dust under the heel of someone who wore Shinichi’s face. It’s not the first time he has done it, going out with Shinichi’s friends and family while he pretends to be him, but it is the first time he’s been caught. 

_You know what this means, don’t you? Kaito, this is enough._

She trembles not like she’s about to cry- no, Ran is stronger than that. She trembles like she’s holding herself back from hurting him. Anger looks graceful on her after so much time spent waiting for Shinichi who came back with an inadequate (always inadequate, after everything he has done to her) apology, after having expectation after expectation crushed until there is nothing left but resignation. 

He didn’t break her trust as much as he spat on it. Shinichi, after this, would think the same.

“Are you going to hurt him?” 

Kaito loosens his stance. He runs his fingers through his hair as the ‘soul’ of Shinichi leaves him, the stiffness of his face giving away under the weight of a too-sharp grin that better suits the man who continued to don the white suit and legacy of the dead. The shift is jarringly fluid to outsiders; Ran proved to be no exception. 

“He’s lucky to have you,” Kaito says instead, a sliver of honesty bleeding into his words. She could be screaming at him, asking him question after question, but she had ultimately settled for wanting to know if he would hurt him. 

He’s done enough damage to the relationship he built. It wouldn’t do him any good to tell another lie, not when he dreams of Shinichi’s broken body under his and his bloodstained soul between his fingers as what little is left of Kuroba Kaito continues to shrink every night. 

So, he doesn’t answer. He would both be a liar and a fool if he said Ran didn’t realize why.

-

The fire blooms, spreads until Shinichi is screaming after he realizes what Kaito has done. Kid absolutely adores the sound; there are parts of him he has yet to see when they’re in love, and this uncontrolled anger – _betrayal_ – tastes sweet as he forces a kiss and feels Shinichi bite at his tongue. A rejection.

“Why?” Shinichi whispers. He is hurt, his whole body shuddering as Kid gently wraps his fingers around his wrists and pins him against the wall. “Why, Kaito? Why are you doing this?”

Kaito traces the tears down his cheeks with his tongue and presses his thigh between Shinichi’s legs. _Don’t do this Kaito. You will regret it. You’ve taken enough. Please._

“Back then, you told me you wished you weren’t yourself. Do you remember?” His lips graze the shell of his ear as he murmurs in a low, comforting tone that contradicted his tightening grip. He squeezes, feeling the bones creak under his grip, and presses a soft kiss on his forehead. _You’re scaring him,_ not-Ran admonishes and it makes him smile wider. “You asked me if I felt the same way.”

The voices fall into a disquieting silence at the sight of Shinichi breaking under Kaito’s touch.

-

The truth is Kaito doesn’t know what ‘being himself’ meant.

So, he takes Shinichi, he takes him as Kaito, as Kid, as not-Ran, not-Heiji, not-Aoko, not-Hakuba. He wears their faces and speaks with their voices until Shinichi stops resisting and he goes limp under him. He lets Kaito take, lets the lies wash over him, the realization that whatever was between them was a carefully calculated risk from the person who he thought was Kuroba Kaito. 

(Kaito – compassionate, considerate, and beautiful Kaito – was easy to love. He never thought to ask why.)

Their sweat cools, and not-Kaito’s gasping breaths quiet. He traces Shinichi’s unmoving form with his eyes, the bruises left by his fingers around his wrists and throat, the scratch marks Shinichi inflicted on his chest while he resisted. 

_You broke him,_ and that voice is his. Not quite Kuroba Kaito but it’s the closest to him he’d ever heard. There is nobody else but him.

_Are you satisfied?_

“I’m sorry,” he finds himself saying and his voice breaks the second the words leave him. He reaches out with a trembling hand to grip his shoulder and make him face his direction, fully expecting the other to flinch away from his touch. “Shinichi, I’m sorry, I’m so _sorry_ …”

Shinichi turns with his urging touch. Red trails down between his thighs and soaks into the sheets under him and Kaito realizes he is too pale and quiet.

“…Shinichi?”

.

.

.

.

.

The line blurs. It’s so very easy for it to happen when they are fundamentally the same people in everything but soul; when people are blinded by grief and clinging to things that aren’t real, feeding into their destructive denial, when they choose what is easier over what is right, when one of them is far too valuable to lose.

Kudo Yukiko - who was always in control of her emotions down to the tips of her fingers, who looked Vermouth in the eyes and feigned grief for the death of her son's friend - allows her face to twist and her composure to fall apart at the sight of him.

"...Shin-chan?” Her hands tremble. It's too soon. Too close. 

Too _real_. 

Her son's face stares back at her, but it's Kaito Kid who smiles. In his arms are blue roses, and beneath them is Kudo Shinichi's grave. 

"Mom," he says. "I'm back."

**Author's Note:**

> ((so at this point, when exactly did shinichi die? or rather, was he even alive in the first place?))
> 
> im craving cup noodles god


End file.
